a church cio

Worship Tunes

For those of you following the IT Roundtable going on at COR this mid-week, listen to the linked file below to see what cool worship you missed out on last evening. This is totally bootleg I admit. Grabbed it with two clicks on my Mac during the song. I would give attribution for their work, but I frankly couldn’t remember anything else after a great day of fantastic discussion. Someone else help me out with their name and summary/link of the church where they play. Was a neat vibe. Church IT Roundtable Worship mp3.

National Church IT Association

Also, we will be talking at some point in the day Thursday about the prospects of a national IT association. Since I won’t be able to stay the whole afternoon and could miss the discussion, I thought I would link back to a post I did on the subject a long while ago title What Ministry Technology, Church IT, and Web Ministry People Have in Common. My feelings haven’t changed too too much, but let me summarize my main points:

• “Church IT” overlaps with Web Ministry. This becomes particularly true with open protocol APIs, web-based applications, intranet/extranets, and integrations of ChMS and CMS. Media and Communications are also both converging with web and traditional IT.
• The Ministry Technology cloud is huge and it is just beginning to coalesce. We should focus on the identification and discovery of the network nodes rather than the formation of another walled garden. We know technology so lets do technology. Leave group formation and organization to the denominations who do it so well.
• We need more glue and less groups. We already have:
  • Established Organizations, Meetups, & Conferences
    International Christian Technologists Association
    National Religious Broadcasters
    ICCM
    Christian Management Association
    NACBA
    ECFA
    Campus Crusade for Christ
    MinistryCom
    Nonprofit Technology Network
  • Group Blogs, Forums, & Listservs
    BetterMinistry.com
    United Methodist Church
    IT-Roundtable
    GodBit
    Church Marketing Sucks
    eMinistry Notes
    ChurchBit Google Group
    TechSoup
    ChMS Discussion
    IT discuss
    Church Tech Blogs
• What we need for glue is an unconference template for regionally-based meetups (at a frequency the local participants desire) all over the world with no significant, centralized overhead. No formation costs. No risk assessments. No insurance. The meetups should be open to traditional IT and Web people in churches and para-church ministries.
• What we need is an approach similar to bitshepherd.com for opening up, syndicating, and aggregating the ministry technology discussions. We need more discovery than this to be able to reach deep into the community that is forming.

In that old post I go into much more detail about what I am saying and not saying, but this is believe it or not the overview of my dissent.

Department: Best Practice, Blogging, Knowledge Management, Strategy & Planning, Web Ministry